Want to Know What Scientists Are Doing With Your Money? Soon You Will Be Able To

What is this researcher doing with your tax dollars? A new policy will let you find out ... eventually. (Image credit: NIH)

Late last week, a memo was released by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) that dramatically changed the relationship between the American public and the scientific enterprise. The six-page document was signed by OSTP Director John Holdren and carried the subject “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research.”

The premise is this: all federal agencies with at least $100 million in yearly research disbursements must ensure that peer-reviewed research articles be made freely available after a 12-month embargo period. (There is a bit of wriggle room, as agencies can try to justify a departure from the year-long stipulation.) The new policy will apply to 19 agencies, and would increase the number of publicly available papers to 180,000, up from 90,000, according to a study from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.

While many open access proponents see the announcement as a move in the right direction, the 12-month lag strikes some as unnecessary. If the goal is to make the research widely accessible, then why wait? UC Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen wishes the OSTP had gone further. “They had an opportunity to do something dramatically important,” he told Nature Magazine, “and instead they recycled a 5-year-old policy.”

So why the embargo? It’s a concession to academic publishers, the industry that is being most negatively affected by last week’s pronouncement. In the current framework, publishers gain revenue from pricey subscription models and fees for publishing articles, and benefit from free labor as the academic community reviews submissions. It’s an unusual arrangement – one that appears a little imbalanced compared with other facets of the media market – but academic publishers do provide unique and valuable services. They provide a centralized home for scientific results and offer high-quality articles contextualizing important findings (the overly-technical language of most articles is unable to make a case for itself, necessitating translation) and highlighting relevant developments in the policy or cultural arenas.

In justifying the 12-month waiting period, Holdren puts it this way in his memo:

“The Administration also recognizes that publishers provide valuable services, including the coordination of peer review, that are essential for ensuring the high quality and integrity of many scholarly publications. It is critical that these services continue to be made available. It is also important that Federal policy not adversely affect opportunities for researchers who are not funded by the Federal Government to disseminate any analysis or results of their research.”

The longer-term question, perhaps, is how to make publishing companies profitable. While revenue from subscriptions and one-off article purchases will likely diminish with last week’s mandate, there are ways to cushion the fall. Ensuring that the distribution of free articles goes through publishers’ own sites – as opposed to a public repository like PubMed Central, which houses NIH-funded work – would maintain page views and their associated advertising revenue. Another option is to directly subsidize publishers: the United Kingdom is considering a policy that shifts 1% of the national research budget to publishing companies in order to make results open access.

Regardless of the specifics, the trend seems clear: publicly funded research is becoming increasingly publicly accessible.